Along the same lines, we're working on creating home directories for users here at the corporate office. We're wanting to limit the amount of storage per user, but from what I've read there is a limitation of 254 qtrees per volume. We're running NT, so therefore using CIFS, and using Ontap 5.3.7R2. We are also running NetIQ, but can't install the agent on the filer. We could limit the disks per volume, but smaller volumes waste more disk space. To give you an idea, we're considering limits of either 250 or 500MB per user.

Unless I misunderstand you, you do not need a separate qtree for each user. Netapps provide both "tree" quotas and "user" quotas.

A "tree" quota limits the total disk space of all files in a directory tree (quota tree), regardless of who owns them.

A "user" quota limits the total disk space of files that are owned by a particular user. It sounds like you can do what you want with "user" quotas in one big volume with no qtrees at all. However, you may want to split things up for other reasons.

"tree" quotas are typically used to limit the disk space of a project or department consisting of multiple users. And if you really like to micromanage, you can even have user quotas within a qtree. For example,

fred user@/vol/vol0 15G - /vol/vol0/qt1 tree 25G - fred user@/vol/vol0/qt1 10G -

Here "fred" can use up to 15G in the volume vol0. The qtree qt1 cannot use more than 25G of vol0. And inside qt1, fred can only use 10G. Any disk space that fred uses inside qt1 also counts against his 15G quota for the entire volume.

Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640

University of Virginia ITC Unix Support